Apple Acquires Beats Electronics

Apple's acquisition of Beats for $3B in 2014 was the largest disclosed acquisition the company has made to date. Apple, which revolutionized the music industry when it released the iPod and iTunes, has fallen behind as music streaming began to dominate consumer consumption habits and led to the rise of Spotify, Rdio, and Tidal among others. The new Apple Music app, based in parts on Beats' technology, could be a serious contender. The fate of Apple Music will help determine the fate of the other streaming music players, and the music industry's future. Apple Music has 11M trial subscribers after its first five weeks, with a 79% retention rate, according to the company. But Apple Music will have to ramp up its user acquisition significantly to succeed.

Paypal Acquires Braintree/Venmo

Peer-to-peer mobile payments app Venmo was acquired by Chicago-based mobile and online payments processor Braintree in 2012 for $26M, and Braintree was later acquired by Paypal for $800M in 2013. Venmoprocessed $700M in payments in Q4'14, up from $141M in Q4'13. Braintree is also a key factor in Paypal's global expansion plans, since the acquired company is popular among international merchants and integrates easily into online and mobile-only startups.Braintree processed $22.8B payments in 2014, more than double the previous year's amount. This acquisition was key for Paypal, which now operates two major players in both the P2P payments and mobile payments spaces after spinning out of eBay.

Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache Merge

Didi and Kuaidi Dache, the largest car-hailing players in China's market, have merged together to form a $15B ride-hailing giant. This move is especially significant as Uber raises $1B+ in capital to move into the country. Didi and Kuaidi Dache have now formed a united front, when they were previously involved in a costly pricing war with each other. China, one of Uber's most important target markets, will now be one of the toughest battle grounds in ride-hailing.

AOL Acquires The Huffington Post

AOL acquired The Huffington Post for $315M in 2011, solidifying the company's bet on content and advertising. The Huffington Post was one of the first crowd-sourced news platforms, allowing many people and bloggers who were not full-time employees to use HuffPo as a medium for their views (a model that Jonah Peretti, one of The Huffington Post's founders, would also use in his later venture, Buzzfeed). The Huffington Post was also an important player in the wave of media companies monetizing through digital ads rather than subscription or paywalls, which has fundamentally changed that industry. When it was acquired, HuffPo had revenue of approximately $30M, while this year it projected revenue is $168M.

Facebook Acquires Instagram

Instagram was bought for $1B in 2012, and some commentators derided the acquisition of a company with no revenue. But since then, other consumer tech acquisitions have soared in value — see Facebook's WhatsApp acquisition below as Exhibit A. Not to mention, Instagram has begun to roll out high-performing ad units. Facebook's bet is now looking smart. Instagram isprojected to do $595M in mobile ad revenue this year, and had 300M users (which is about the same as Twitter) in December 2014 compared to 30M when Instagram was acquired. The bet on Instagram was also a larger part of Facebook's early strategy of shifting it's focus to mobile, where it now generates 76% of it's ad revenue.

Kakao and Daum Merge

Kakao, maker of South Korea's top messaging app, and Daum, one of the country's largest internet portals, merged to form the $9.5B Daum Kakao. The new company creates a serious rival to fend off competition from WeChat and Line Corporation, a company spun out of the larger NHN Japan. This merger illustrates the high stakes involved in the messaging wars happening outside of the US, where controlling the market share is key, since messaging functions as an "all-in-one" platform for other services, including commerce, gaming, and payments.

LinkedIn Acquires Lynda.com

LinkedIn's acquisition of online learning platform Lynda for $1.5B in April 2015 was one of the few unicorn exits of 2015 (despite the overall number of unicorn companies valued at $1B+jumping to new heights). This acquisition is significant for a few reasons.

Finally, Lynda fills an important gap for LinkedIn, which links together jobs to people with those relevant skills. Now with Lynda, users have a direct platform to develop those skills and earn credentials, furthering LinkedIn's reputation as "your online resume".

Intuit Acquires Mint

Intuit, known for its software platforms Quicken, TurboTax, and Quickenbooks, acquired Mint.com for $170M in 2009, just three years after the company launched. Braving through the recession, Mint became a popular personal finance app, which challenged Quicken's dominance of the field by putting an emphasis on UI/UX and ease of use. Intuit acquiring Mint was one of the first startup acquisitions in the personal finance space, which has gotten especially hot in recent years. Intuit's acquisition was smart because it removed one of their biggest competitors, brought a design focus to their products, and widened the potential pipeline of customers moving from their personal finance platforms to other relevant software such as TurboTax. Mint's user base has also grown significantly, from 1M at the acquisition to more than 13M in 2013.

Microsoft Acquires Mojang

Microsoft bought Mojang, the maker of wildly popular game Minecraft, for $2.5B at the end of 2014. Minecraft was entirely bootstrapped, proving you don't need to raise money to be a unicorn and exit at $1B+. The acquisition highlighted Microsoft's new strategy of focusing on mobile-centric products, and bolsters Microsoft's gaming product line. Microsoft already has an enviable perch in the gaming industry given the Xbox, desktop, and VR platforms it currently owns. The acquisition also gives Microsoft a channel into the younger demographics that Minecraft targets, specifically people below the age of 15, andcould easily become a multibillion dollar franchise on its own, similar to the multimedia empire that Lego built. Finally, watching how Microsoft handles Minecraft going forward will be important, since it not only has to handle the game itself, but needs to make sure that the community that's developed around the game is maintained (a struggle many large companies face when acquiring community-centric startups).

Google Acquires Nest

Nest, the smart home thermostat company, was bought by Google for $3.2B in early 2014. Not only did the search giant pick up Nest's founder Tony Fadell, in the past one of Apple's top product designers, but it also made a significant foray into the home-automation and smart home spaces. Furthered by the subsequent acquisition of Dropcam, Nest represents an entire division within Google's parent company, Alphabet, to introduce consumer tech into homes, and capture data/and provide services during those moments when you're not on your smartphone or computer. The acquisition also represented a win for thebeleaguered greentech industry, putting a spotlight on energy saving and energy data analytics.

Facebook Acquires Oculus

Facebook bought Oculus for $2B in 2014, with the VR company raising only $93M prior to the deal. Virtual reality is still a nascent field, but with the acquisition of Oculus, Facebook has positioned itself to be leader in the category. Facebook was quickly followed by other major tech corporations including Samsung, Microsoft, and Google — all quickly announcing their own version of VR headsets. The Oculus acquisition also represents Facebook's interest in venturing into cutting-edge, unproven technologies (another major project is Facebook's solar-powered UAV, Aquila). Oculus is slated for consumer release in early 2016, and will represent Facebook's first consumer hardware for purchase, though its success is of course to be determined.

Twitter Acquires Periscope

Periscope was acquired for approximately $100M in March 2015, and Twitter officially released the app after mobile live video-streaming competitor Meerkat unveiled theirs at SXSW a few weeks before. Periscope had 1 million active accounts after its first 10 days, and now has 10 million as of August 2015. Periscope is a proving ground for whether or not a large audience exists for live mobile video streaming. The company has already created problems for high-value live events (such as the Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao boxing fight) but also has the capability to transform industries such as news or content as a whole. It will take time to see whether or not Twitter's bet will pay off, and whether Periscope will succeed in its battle for market share against Meerkat.

Tencent Acquires Riot Games

Tencent acquired a majority stake in "League of Legends" game studio Riot Games in 2011, when the company had 1 million total active players and estimated revenue of $50M. League of Legends generated over $1B in revenue in 2014 with67M people playing per monthaccording to the studio's website. This was one of the largest cross-border game acquisitions of its time, and the bet has more than paid itself off.

Softbank Corp. Acquires Supercell

Japanese telecom giant Softbank bought a majority stake in game company Supercell in 2013 for $1.5B, when Supercell had yearly revenues of approximately $570M. In 2014 Supercell had revenue of $1.7B and also more than doubled its earnings to $565M compared to the year prior. Softbank also increased its holdings in the company to 73%. Supercell is now a$5.5B company thatmarks one of the few breakout successes in mobile gaming, a field VCshave typically avoided investing in.

Amazon Acquires Twitch

Amazon bought Twitch for around $1B in 2014 after beating out other suitors like Google. This move is significant for several reasons:

It legitimizes the growth of e-sports as a sector — i.e., watching video games as a spectator sport — and gives Amazon excellent positioning to become a major player in this category.Amazon's acquisition could prove to be extremely prophetic if the market for e-sports continues to grow.

It also continues Amazon's strategy of moving into media content, alongside investments in Amazon Instant Video and original programming.

Twitch's growth has continued. When Twitch was acquired, it already had 55 million unique viewers in the month, and 6 months after the Amazon acquisition was already seeing 100 million monthly visitors. Twitch currently takes more of total revenue share for gaming videos than YouTubeaccording to a report by Superdata.

But with YouTube launching a competitor, YouTube Gaming, this balance could shift in the future.

Alibaba Acquires UCWeb

Between 2009 and 2013, Alibaba's investments in UCWeb resulted in an ownership stake of 66%, and Alibaba bought the rest of the shares in 2014 in a deal valuing the company above $1.9B. Flush with cash from its IPO, Alibaba has made it clear that it plans to reinvest this money into growth by expanding into new areas, particularly in mobile and search. China has 54% 3G and 4G penetration in it's overall mobile population of 1.29B people, but that proportion is growing and Alibaba is trying to position itself to take advantage of this. While the company has made a number of small investments in US companies (Lyft, Snapchat, etc.), it has kept focused on the Chinese market and has made several billion dollar deals to reinforce this, including UCWeb, AutoNavi, Koubei, etc. This acquisition also puts Alibaba in a position to acquire mobile market share from its competitor, Baidu. UCWeb commands 65% of China's mobile search market, and also holds the largest mobile browser share in India.

Twitter Acquires Vine

Twitter acquired short-video site Vine for $30M in 2012, just 4 months after it was created. Vine saw 34.5M unique US visitors in June, which was the same number as Snapchat. The service is making its first monetization play by acquiring the startup Niche, which matches Vine talent with brand advertisers, and has developed into a thriving social tool that has given rise to many influential Vine personalities. Vine also gives Twitter a foothold into younger demographics that might not turn the parent service as frequently — a youth-centric strategy furthered by Vine's launch of the companion app, Vine Kids, aimed at a child audience.

Google Acquires Waze

Google bought Waze for $1.3B in 2013, a strategic play for Google which solidified their mapping and navigation dominance. The purchase removed Google Maps' main competitor, and was even investigated by US regulator Federal Trade Commission for violating anti-trust laws (which it later determined it did not). Waze's user-generated data not only helps Google Maps with accuracy, but also adds a social and interactive layer to the already robust platform. And finally, Waze unrolled local ads onto the platform as a monetization move, which falls directly in line with Google's core business and allows them to leverage their vast geo data to boost revenue. The acquisition was also a big win for Israel's booming tech scene, and was one of the country's largest tech exits.

Facebook Acquires Whatsapp

Facebook is getting very serious about messaging. Before they removed messaging from the main app, and relaunched Messenger as a third-party developer platform, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a head-turning $19B in 2014. The company had 450M users when it was acquired, and broke 800M MAUs in April 2015, with most of their user base outside the US, instantly giving Facebook massive user and penetration growth in messaging markets globally. Facebook has still not significantly monetized WhatsApp (other than a modest preexisting subscription revenue stream), and has guaranteed it will be ad-free (which runs against the grain of its core business). One possible method for WhatsApp monetization will be "business-to-consumer" messaging, which is already being tried in Messenger. In this, Facebook is taking a page from the strategy of its Asian messaging competitors like Line. Facebook bought WhatsApp at a huge price tag returning solo-backer Sequoia's fund many times over, and led other VCs to search for their "WhatsApp exit".

Amazon Acquires Zappos

Amazon acquired Zappos for $807M+ in 2009 in one of the largest e-commerce acquisitions to happen after the dot-com era. The deal been fruitful for Amazon, which acquired a company that already had net revenue of $635M at the time of acquisition. Zappos has also carved a niche out for itself in e-commerce by emphasizing its company culture and obsessive customer service, the latter of which Amazon prides itself on today and has been a big differentiator for the parent company. It's important to note that Amazon bought Zappos at a little more than 1x net revenue which is a much lower multiple than the valuation of many e-commerce companies today (with Amazon itself trading between 2x and 2.5x price-to-sales ratio of the trailing twelve months).

1. AOL buys Time Warner, $106 billion

Thinking of AOL as a separate company may seem like a distant memory since it essentially got swallowed up by Time Warner (rather than vise versa), but thisacquisitionrepresented the peak of dot-com excess. The merger was announced in 2000, and the price tag was initially $165 billion, due to a high market capitalization, but the burst of the dot com bubble quickly cut down that price by the time the deal closed. Still, this deal happened at the last possible second that the market would accept a +$100 billion deal, and tech stocks collapsed soon after.

Sound off in the comments if you still have any free AOL internet CDs.

2. Facebook buys WhatsApp, $19 billion

Clearedearlier this year, the $19 billion Facebook acquisition of WhatsApp represents the largest exit of a venture capital-backed company in history. WhatsApp allows users to send mobile messages to one another, and the acquisition was met with criticism from some privacy groups who saw the potential for user data to be monetized by Facebook.

3. HP buys Compaq, $18.6 billion

Asrecommended by John Cleese's brother-in-lawin the late 1980s, Compaq computers were a force to be reckoned with. In the early 2000s, however, the brand began to falter and fellow giant HP began looking for a way to capture it. The acquisition was initially announced in June 2001 at a higher price tag, but HP closed the deal in May 2002 for close to $19 billion. The deal was at the time, and remains the biggest computer hardware deal in history.

4. HP buys EDS, $13.9 billion

In lateAugust 2008, HP completed the purchaseof Electronic Data Systems Corporation (EDS) for nearly $14 billion. EDS was a multinational company started by Ross Perot and headquartered in Plano, Texas. EDS was known for building an automatic code generator and a system for allowing ATMs to take money, but HP bought it for its IT services business. The current corporate entity is referred to as HP Enterprise Services.

5. Symantec buys Veritas, $13.5 billion

In the middle of 2005, security software companySymantec finalized its purchase of Veritas, a company focused on storage management known for creating the first commercial journaling file system. Not only did the deal give Symantec a slew of new product offerings from Veritas, but it also afforded access to the Veritas list of Fortune 500 company clients.

6. Google buys Motorola Mobility, $12.5 billion

In 2012, Google made its first step towards becoming a hardware company when it completed itsacquisition of Motorola Mobility. The purchase was by far Google's largest to date at the time, but the company has since struggled to compete in the hardware space. Google recently unloaded part ofMotorola Mobility for $2.9 billion, leading many to question why Google even bought it in the first place.

7. Oracle buys PeopleSoft, $10.3 billion

After a year and a half struggle,Oracle closed on its acquisition of PeopleSoftin January 2005. The hostile takeover was originally rejected by PeopleSoft, but it eventually agreed to the merger; making Oracle second only to SAP at the time for business software.

8. HP buys Autonomy, $10.3 billion

In October 2011, 87% of Autonomy's shareholders agreed to$10.24 billion dealto be acquired by HP. Autonomy is a UK company whose products came from research performed at the University of Cambridge. The majority of Autonomy's products were based on Bayesian inference and were geared toward the enterprise. The company is now known as HP Autonomy.

9. Microsoft buys Skype, $8.5 billion

In 2011 video calls were taking off and Skype was leading the charge. When European regulators cleared the deal in late 2011, it became official that Microsoftpurchased the company. eBay first acquired Skype in 2005 and the company was later sold to a group led by Silver Lake Partners in 2009 before landing at Microsoft.

10. Oracle buys Sun Microsystems, $7.4 billion

Perhaps one of the most strategic purchases Oracle has made was toacquire Sun Microsystems. Oracle paid cash for Sun which, at the time, was a struggling company. The acquisition gave Oracle ownership over both the Java programming language and the Solaris operating system.